me?” Jaywalker said, feigning surprise, but knowing immediately that he’d blown it. Greed will get you every time.
“Mr. Tannenbaum will never go for it,” he heard Robert saying. “Not in a million years. Anything less than thirty-five grand and he’ll think he’s getting second-rate service.” He proceeded to fill out the amount in the blank space.
Two hours after they’d left, Jaywalker was still pulling the check out of his pocket every fifteen minutes to stare at it, counting the zeroes one by one to make sure it said what he thought it did.
Thirty-five thousand dollars.
He’d gotten less on murder cases.
A lot less.
The matter had been resolved with what Jaywalker liked to think of as mixed results. Samara ended up pleading guilty to driving while impaired and operating a motor vehicle without a license. She entered her plea on her third court appearance, Jaywalker having obtained two earlier postponements for no reason other than fear of being disbarred for life for charging a fee that worked out to something in the neighborhood of $17,500 an hour.
Grand larceny, by any measure.
Samara paid—or rather, Robert paid on her behalf—a fine of $350, plus another hundred or so in court costs. She was compelled to take a one-day safe-driving course (no doubt she elected Lamborghini Navigation 101) and attend a three-hour substance abuse seminar, and was prohibited from applying for a learner’s permit or driver’s license for a period of eighteen months.
That was the good news.
The bad news, at least so far as Jaywalker was concerned, was that his infatuation with Samara never progressed beyond the staring point. Robert was always around. And the truth was, as even Jaywalker would have had to admit in his more reflective moments, had Robert not been around, things would have been no different. Not once did Samara ever indicate that she was the least bit interested in anything from Jaywalker besides legal representation. When the case ended and he went to embrace her (something he’d done with men and women, killers and rapists, he rationalized), she turned her head at the very last second, so that his kiss landed dryly on her cheek.
“Stay out of trouble,” he told her.
“I will,” she promised.
5
RIKERS ISLAND
Promises being what they are, they occasionally go unkept.
Six years later, Jaywalker had been looking over the front page of the New York Times Metropolitan section when he spotted an item well below the center fold. Apparently the Times considered the news fit to print, but only barely.
WIFE HELD IN KILLING OF WEALTHY FINANCIER
it said. He might have read no farther, having little empathy for financiers on the best of days, let alone wealthy financiers. In fact, he was trying to figure out if the phrase was redundant when his eyes, drifting down the fine print, came to rest on the name Samara Moss Tannenbaum, and stopped right there. It was as though he were suddenly seeing her again, sitting across his office desk, utterly powerless to take his eyes off her, just as now he was powerless to take them off her printed name.
He forced himself to blink, once, then twice, just so he could look away. Then he lowered himself into his chair—the same chair he’d sat in six years earlier, behind the same desk—and, folding the paper in half, began to read.
A 26-year-old woman was arrested early this morning in connection with the death of her husband, a financier described by Forbes magazine as having a net worth in excess of ten billion dollars.
According to a source close to the investigation, who insisted upon anonymity because he is unauthorized to speak publicly for the police department, Samara Moss Tannenbaum was accused of stabbing her husband, Barrington Tannenbaum, 70, once in the chest. The wound was deep enough to perforate the victim’s heart and cause him to bleed to death, said the source.
(Continued on page 36)
Jaywalker unfolded the paper and thumbed his way through the section until he found page 36. He spread it open in front of him, fully intending to read the balance of the article. But it would turn out to be hours before he did. What stopped him was a pair of photographs, typical black-and-white newspaper portraits arranged side by side. The one to the left was of a slight balding man in a business suit and tie who, Jaywalker knew, had to be the victim. But he never so much as read the caption beneath it. It was the other photo, the one to the right, that captured him. Staring directly at him was Samara Tannenbaum, her eyes narrowly set and black as coals, her lower lip curled into what either was or could easily have been mistaken for a pout. Jaywalker would stare at the photograph for what seemed like hours, as utterly unable to look away as he had been the day she’d first walked into his office six years earlier.
For two full days he thought of no one and nothing else. He thought about her lying in bed at night. He dreamed about her. He awoke thinking about her. He had to beg a judge for an adjournment of a trial long scheduled to begin, feigning conjunctivitis when the real problem was concentration. He ate little, slept less and lost six pounds.
Just before two o’clock in the afternoon of the third day, as he was getting ready to go back to court for a sentencing on a marijuana case, the phone rang. Jaywalker was going to let the answering machine get it, but at the last moment he decided to pick up.
“Jaywalker,” he said.
“Samara,” said a recorded female voice, followed by a male one, “is calling collect from a correctional facility. If you wish to accept the charges, please press one now.”
Jaywalker pressed one.
He met with her the following day, at the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island. Met with being something of a stretch, since their conversation was in actuality conducted through a five-inch circular hole cut out of the center of a wire-reinforced, bulletproof pane of glass.
“You look terrible,” he told her.
“Thanks.”
It was true, in a way, the same way Natalie Wood might have looked terrible after four days in jail, or a young Elizabeth Taylor. Samara’s hair was a tangle of knots (so much for its being naturally straight), her eyes were puffy and bloodshot and her skin had an artificial, fluorescent cast to it. She was wearing an orange jumpsuit that had to be three sizes too big for her. Yet once again, Jaywalker found it impossible to take his eyes off her.
“I didn’t do it,” she said.
He nodded. Earlier that morning, he had phoned the lawyer who’d been assigned to stand up for her at her first court appearance. They’d talked for ten minutes, long enough for Jaywalker to learn that the charge was murder, that the detectives had executed a search warrant at Samara’s town house and come up with a veritable shitload of evidence, including a knife with what looked like dried blood on it, and that Samara was so far denying her guilt.
That was okay. A lot of Jaywalker’s clients claimed they were innocent early on in the game. It was only after they’d gotten to know him for a while that they dared
